With President Obama’s re-election last night, we can be even more confident that the Administration’s No Child Left Behind waivers are likely to continue, at least until they expire in 2014*. The waivers rely on educational accountability systems that place much more weight on normative comparisons than performance against an absolute standard. That means concerns about setting the “righContinue Reading »

This Thanksgiving, those of us following the ESEA reauthorization debate have a lot to be thankful for. Who’d have thought the last few months would be so exciting?

We have a bipartisan (sort of) Senate ESEA Reauthorization bill passed out of the HELP Committee. Depending on your point of view, you could be thankful for a lot of things here: a) that a reauthorization bill has gotten thisContinue Reading »

In May the Center on Education Policy (CEP) released a report looking at how states structured their Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs). The No Child Left Behind Act required only that AMOs reach 100% by 2014 and that each increase must be equivalent, and it allowed states up to three years of no growth. It being 2002 at the time, about half the states chose to backload their AMOs, calling forContinue Reading »